Managing the full lifecycle of an oil and gas field asset (hereinafter “asset”) involves making decisions concerning the project (e.g. development of all components required to produce oil and/or gas from the asset) based on limited information to more information that corresponds with high uncertainty to lower uncertainty, respectively. These decisions occur at key stages of the asset lifecycle and have the potential to influence the value of the asset. The potential impact of early and then successive decisions can either increase or decrease the value of the asset. It is therefore, important that these decisions are optimized over the lifecycle of the asset as soon as possible when new information is discovered that allows a significant reduction of uncertainty and a measurable improvement in the financial outcome of a decision.
It is well understood that a conventional integrated-asset-model (IAM), which is illustrated in FIG. 6 and models the asset from the bottom of the reservoir to a surface facility, must be updated to reflect current reservoir, well, and surface facility conditions; otherwise, it loses its value. Each IAM may include a reservoir model, well models, surface facility models and economic models. Equally important for asset owners is maintenance of their models over time, which is commonly referred to as a persistent asset model (PAM) and is illustrated in FIG. 7. The conventional approach to PAM, using disjoint models created at different stages of an asset's lifecycle, is a time-consuming, piecemeal strategy that produces less accurate results. Furthermore, integration of the IAM and PAM remains a goal that has still not been reached by most operators. One reason maintenance of an IAM over time is difficult is that many different people from a variety of functional areas create models of an asset at different times for different purposes. These models are, evidently, quite different and often challenging to reconcile with one another. A related cause of difficulty in IAM lifecycle maintenance is the fact that different amounts and/or types of data are available at different stages in the lifecycle of an asset because information accrues over time allowing later (e.g. production) stage models to be more sophisticated than those created at the appraisal and development stages. Therefore, lifecycle maintenance of an IAM must involve reconciliation of varied descriptions of an asset, each containing successively greater amounts of data at finer levels of granularity as the asset progresses through the different stages of its development (e.g. acquire, evaluate, appraise, select, define, execute, produce).